Lately I'm seeing more and more articles referring me to the Public Library of Science website, otherwise known as PLoS. I decided to take a look and am impressed with this revolution in the making. I fully endorse it.

I've been seeing the deterioration of university library collections to the general public because of restrictively licensed eBooks and eJournals. At least in the days of paper bound books and articles I could walk into a university library and gain free access to cutting edge knowledge. Digital journal technology has been a regressive force for the most part until now.

PLoS has an interesting way of making money - it charges authors, on average, $2000 USD to publish an article in one of its journals. I think that it is a good use of public money (i.e., from academic grants) to cover the costs of having your article professionally promoted, hosted, and managed over time in an open-access format. It is not the obligation of researchers to line the pockets of the journal publishing industry by giving them their research and expertise for free and allowing the them to charge a hefty fee for access to that research and expertise (effectively taking it out of circulation to the general public). I'd probably go further and say it is unethical of publicly funded academics to be publishing in electronically-gated journals now that an open-access service like PLoS is a completely viable alternative.